Myspace friend, Falstaff, has just written a poem which uses the word ‘khaki’, which reminds me of the popular military uniform color adopted by various armies.

The word "khaki" is a Pashtun word which means "dusty."

Here is an interesting account which I googled just now:

The Pashtuns number upwards of 20 million, and their squat stony
villages straddle the Durand Line that nominally demarcates Pakistan
from Afghanistan, where Pashtuns form the largest ethnic group. These
are the fighters who inspired reams of fearful and admiring verse from
Rudyard Kipling, the sharpshooters blessed with perfect sight who
picked off the soldiers of the British Raj. But the Pashtuns also
produced one of the most remarkable pacifist movements of the 20th
century.

British officers were so impressed by Pashtun valor that in 1847 they
created a Pashtun force, the Corps of Guides — its emblem was crossed
sabers over the slogan ‘‘Rough and Ready’‘ — that was soon celebrated
in the Indian Army. They led the way in adopting uniforms in a new
color, khaki, and became the prototype for today’s special forces.

The fascination with Pashtuns endured until the Raj’s demise. Sir Olaf
Caroe, the last British governor of the North-West Frontier, left a
systematic account, ‘‘The Pathans’‘ (1958), complete with pullout maps
and translations of love poems by the great Pashtun bard, Khushal Khan,
who died in the 17th century. Caroe favored the partition of India and
believed that a Muslim state and its frontier warriors would form a
firewall blocking a Soviet advance toward the Persian Gulf. The success
of this policy depended on Pashtun military prowess — and Caroe’s
greatest problem was a Pashtun pacifist, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who
confounded every cliché about Caroe’s favored martial race.

Ghaffar was renowned as ‘‘the frontier Gandhi.’‘ His followers, the
Servants of God, were nicknamed Red Shirts because of their
brick-colored garb. All had to swear: ‘‘I shall never use violence. I
shall not retaliate or take revenge, and shall forgive anyone who
indulges in oppression and excesses against me.’‘

For two decades, Ghaffar and his Red Shirts dominated the North-West
Frontier without resort to violence, enduring prison and torture.
Ghaffar’s friend and mentor, Mohandas Gandhi, called his feat ‘‘a
miracle.’‘ Nevertheless, the most remarkable Pashtun of his era is
forgotten, not only because his cause was lost — he sought self-rule
for his people within a united, secular India — but because it was an
embarrassment to Britain, India and Pakistan alike.

A new biography, ‘‘The Pathan Unarmed’‘ by Mukulika Banerjee, adds
fresh light. The author began her study as a graduate student in the
1990’s, and after learning Pashto managed to interview 70 surviving Red
Shirts. She found that Ghaffar’s pacifism grew out of his concept of
jihad, or holy war, because nonviolent resistance ‘‘offered the chance
of martyrdom in its purest form, since putting one’s life conspicuously

in one’s enemy’s hands was itself the key act.’‘

Using this strategy, the Red Shirts in 1930 shut down Peshawar for five
days protesting colonial rule, becoming valued Muslim allies of
Gandhi’s predominantly Hindu Congress Party. The movement flourished,
and each wave of arrests confirmed Ghaffar Khan’s status as the
liberating champion of his people, who now called him Badshah Khan, or
the Khan of Khans.

In 1947, in final negotiations for independence, Gandhi acceded to
partition and the establishment of Pakistan. A distraught Ghaffar Khan,
feeling abandoned by his Hindu allies and angrily aware that Caroe
favored a Muslim state, asked his followers to boycott the referendum
on joining Pakistan, whose founding he opposed because he wanted a
united, secular India. Now derided as a lackey of ‘‘the Hindu Raj,’‘
Ghaffar Khan was imprisoned and charged with sedition by Islamabad’s
new masters. When the great rebel insisted that he wanted only autonomy
within Pakistan, it was rejected as a ruse, since Afghanistan seized on
this moment to revive territorial claims to Peshawar and other areas
once held by Kabul.

The sequel was a martial crackdown by Pakistani authorities, echoing
the British line about the incorrigible violence and suspect loyalties
of Pashtuns. Ghaffar was eventually released from jail but banished
from the frontier. In his last years he was allowed to revisit
Peshawar, where in 1988 he died at the age of 98. According to an
earlier biography by M. S. Korejo, a Pakistani diplomat, a funeral
procession stretching for miles carried Badshah Kahn’s body across the
border to Jalalabad, the summer home of Afghan kings. It was, the
author writes, ‘‘a caravan of peace, carrying a message of love’‘ from
Pashtuns east of the Khyber to those on the west.

This forgotten chapter suggests that Islam is more mutable than either
its radical adherents or its Western detractors allow — and that
Pashtun history offers an extraordinary precedent for peace as well as
a legacy of war.